Читать книгу Facing the Sky - Roy F. Fox - Страница 12

Introduction: An Unfinished Furrow

The gravel in the parking lot of the old church across the road shone zinc white in the sun. This church held ice cream socials to raise money, sold cardboard fans with gaudy pictures of Jesus on them, and, for a dollar, bottles of imitation vanilla. I knew people used it in cooking but could not understand why it was a big deal. I once saw my eighty-five-year-old great aunt dab a fingertip of it behind each ear as a kind of perfume, but it still didn’t add up. As a ten-year-old in Paradise, Missouri, in the sweltering August of 1959, I moved inside a glass jar and a huge, resounding stillness. Nothing moved.

The only competition with my great aunt’s squat, relic-like presence was my grandparents’ brown plastic View Master and its white disks that rotated photos of Niagara Falls. A more exotic treat was a five-cent Hershey bar or an orange Nehi soda from Hafferty’s Farm Implement store. There was nothing to read, either, if you discounted the tiny gray print of The Smithville Democrat Herald, which reported the locals’ activities, such as, “Mrs. Claudie Archer’s nephew and his family, from Platte City, visited on Sunday.” The only other reading material was the archaic gibberish in the Bible.

Across from the church and down the road, the vacant house overgrown with brown weeds, tangled trumpet vine, and sticky burrs stood perfectly silent as usual, but I would not poke around in it on this day, even though the marbles, shells, and pebbles of glass randomly lodged into its outer plastered walls remained just as mysterious as ever. What kind of people in the middle of rural Missouri would make a house like that? On this day, though, the ghosts that I was sure hovered there would have to dissolve inside themselves and wait for another day. It didn’t occur to me to go there, because, on this day, everything was different.

I knew that the yard, house, chicken coop, wire fences, and cellar were not really different. It was just that they no longer mattered. Like they weren’t even there. Or they had somehow shifted from being three-dimensional into being faded, cardboard props. My grandfather, Pop, had just disappeared from the earth, and inside of me, everything was churned up, voided. I was confused and cut loose from an anchor I didn’t realize was there. My grandfather, Daniel Harrison Fox, was soft-spoken, tall, lean, and gentle as a lamb’s ear. Never critical, often quietly bemused. Why him?

Instead, I wandered in my grandparents’ yard, away from the shuffling, small groups of elderly farm neighbors who milled about the porch and steps quietly paying their respects, carrying covered dishes of green bean casserole, potato salad, and pies, especially the sticky-sweet pecan pies. There seemed to be dozens of each. I didn’t know what to do or where to go, and I found myself in the back of their small home, where they had moved after leaving their farm. The garden was half-plowed. In the middle of an unfinished row, a rusted hand-plow rested. Next, I spotted a small homemade bench made of weathered boards in a simple T-shape, stuck into the ground. Not steady, but good enough to sit and catch your breath.

After the hushed, humble neighbors shuffled off, it was time for Sunday afternoon-dinner, which we often had with my grandparents, though this time, my grandfather would not be shaking extra salt on his ham or, afterward, drying the dishes handed him by my grandmother—the only times I ever saw them talk together. My great aunt, Betty Rupe, the widow of a country doctor, lived with them. She was small, squat, chatty as a parakeet, and did not believe that the earth rotated on its axis because, if it did, “we’d all fall off.” Aunt Betty left her false teeth on the table beside her glass during dinner. I couldn’t bear looking at them, lest they came clacking down the tablecloth and clamped onto my fingers. Dinner usually consisted of green beans, smoked and salty ham from Dave Lizer’s locker, fried chicken, baked oysters, rolls, mashed potatoes, and fruit salad with tiny marshmallows.

My parents, grandmother, aunt, and everyone were placing plates and bowls on the table as I watched in silence. How could they? Didn’t they know he had just died? The well inside me came surging upward. I broke into tears and ran outside. I sat on the slope near the garage and quieted down, then laid back on the grass and stared at the clouds blowing across the sky, giving way to blue expanses, unfolding into oblivion. I wasn’t there long before returning to the dining room. I don’t remember what any of the adults said to me. Likely nothing. It just wasn’t something you talked about.

We all have our first experience with death. I had no warning about what would happen or what the funeral would be like, how the burial would work. In those days, these things were not talked about. As I sensed at the time, the adults in that dining room were also grieving, carrying around their own weighty sadness and confusion on their insides. It just wasn’t something you talked about.

Three decades later, I am with my friend, Tom, in a sunny backyard in Idaho. I had recently buried our cat, Buford. I looked up as my daughter, Emma, five years old, was leading Tom to the outer edge of the yard, under the huge fir trees. She started chirping out of the blue: “Wanna know what happens when you die?” she asked.

“What?” Tom said, not missing a beat. “Well, first they wrap you in a towel, then they put you in a box, then they put you in the ground,” she answered.

A few days earlier, we’d buried Buford, our gentle, elegant, orange and white cat, and I’d hoped she’d forgotten about it. At least she was talking about her first experience with death, however tersely practical her summary. I’d just read aloud to Emma E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (her first real book, as I wrote on the flyleaf) about the spider, Charlotte, that spins webs for her friend, Wilbur, the pig, to read. Wilbur, the runt of the litter, had been rescued from death by Fern Arable, the owner’s daughter. Wilbur again faced his fears of death when the geese told him that his new owner, Mr. Zuckerman, was planning to fatten him up for the Christmas dinner.

Charlotte promised to save her new friend. When she spun the phrases, “some pig,” “terrific,” and others into her web, Wilbur began acting like some pig, doing tricks and stunts to amaze the people around him. This beautifully-crafted, simple story has much to say about people and nature and the cycle of life and death. But it’s also about the powers of expression, of words and what they can do, especially during those times when our lives become redefined for us. At that time in Paradise, Missouri, it never occurred to anyone to talk things out, much less to write it up. Somehow, the word and the image did not exist for such purposes. But when we’re jerked into a new reality, facing the unfathomable, composing through words and pictures can help us sort things out, understand, and go on.

***

In this book, I use writing interchangeably with composing, and both terms apply to any medium or symbol system. As well, composing through trauma has two meanings here. First, to create or write or compose something in words and images related to the trauma. If you compose in word and image, you’ll often arrive at the second meaning—to compose yourself—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This all means coping, yes, but it goes beyond that.

At a recent international conference called “Making Sense of Pain,” there was much talk about “coping strategies,” from medical doctors, medical anthropologists, counselors, and others. Just as often, the question kept surfacing from different people: “But what do we do with pain?” I finally spoke up, first explaining that while I understood the usefulness of the phrase, “coping strategies,” I found it limiting, and second, more importantly, what we should do with pain—physical, emotional, spiritual—is simple: transform the pain into something else—create a mission, perhaps a mission that is connected with the pain, one that can help others: a written composition, a film, an essay, a scholarship, a garden, a poem, a barn, or a video. The first step in transforming pain is to get it out into the light, through purposeful action. Only then does it become more visible and, therefore, less scary, subject to reflection, manipulation, revision, and re-conceptualization into a more ordered and calmer internal landscape.

I’ve believed in composing through trauma for a long time—creating words, piling up brush for burning, painting a portrait or a house, constructing anything—in order to bypass the pain, to lessen its gnawing at my consciousness. I’ve somehow found these construction sites all along the roads I’ve taken through my personal and professional life. As a kid—since I could sit at a table, according to my mother—I spent all my time drawing and painting. The best thing my mother ever did for me was to keep me supplied with blank white paper. I guess that I was told that I, too, was “some pig” and maybe even “terrific,” so maybe I believed it. I was an art major for a few years before going into English, but I’ve continued composing to this day. I’ve spent my life shamelessly cajoling my students to compose, too, whether it be basic writing or advanced composition, or technical and professional writing, or poetry, or creative nonfiction, or doctoral dissertations and research articles.

No matter when or where or who, I’d often encounter people who somehow changed when they wrote about what was most important and confusing and troubling to them. The traumatic experiences that had festered within them had never been freed because they thought it was “not academic,” or because, if and when they did venture such writing, they were shut down by their teachers. I’ve seen this scenario time and again: in “mainstream” college writing courses; in remedial writing classes; in teachers and students in a state-run youth offenders program; in undergraduate and graduate students studying to be schoolteachers and college professors. People need to make sense of what’s most important to them. Their issues seep under doors and ooze out of closed lids and cracks. Many teachers receive such trauma-focused writing from their students, regardless of what is assigned.

More often, composing through trauma occurs, sadly, only by accident, when circumstances happen to align. When we carry a serious trauma within us and fail to do anything with it, then it is often published in some way. If it’s not written or somehow processed through language or art or some other form, it can be acted out with far more severe consequences—acted out through violence or social isolation or substance abuse.

Cleanly defining composing through trauma always seems to fall short, but here’s my version. The essential concept runs under different aliases: “writing as healing,” “expressive language,” “writing for wellness,” “transitional writing,” “therapeutic writing,” and more. Regardless of the label, any useful definition has to be broad; if not, it defeats the whole enterprise. In short, I define composing through trauma as any kind of communication or product that focuses on any kind of traumatic experience—any experience that harms, worries, saddens, scares, or makes the writer anxious; any experience that creates feelings of violation, dissociation, isolation, alienation, confusion, depression, or inferiority.

Some topics that are often written about include, but are not limited to, the following: death of a loved one; suicide; rape; alcohol or drug addiction; divorce and other forms of separation; gender orientation; disease and illness; relationships with parents, children, and siblings; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); cultural and racial bias; and all forms of physical and psychological abuse. Keep in mind that these “traumas” necessarily exist on a continuum—from the less serious to the most severe. This notion of “How severe is your trauma?” calls to mind the posters in doctors’ offices that show a series of ten circular faces, progressing from Mr. Frowny to Mr. Smiley. However, I’m not sure that pain can be a number. As well, one woman’s minor irritant may be another man’s demon. We have to take people at their word, as to the degree of severity of any given trauma, at any given time.

Lucy, whom you’ll meet in the pages ahead, defines composing through trauma this way:

“And when you say writing as healing—what am I healing? It’s not like I am going to heal or be on the mend—so I guess what I am healing is my . . . spirit, my identity—how to integrate this new aspect of my life that has caused a rupture in who I was, how I saw myself.” Lucy understands that she must fuse her “new” present into her past. As Anderson and MacCurdy (2000) state, “the chief healing effect of writing is . . . to recover and to exert a measure of control over that which we can never control—the past” (7). Also, the term healing is problematic for Lucy, as it is for many of us, which is why it should be treated with some nuance, as Anderson and MacCurdy recommend:

Healing is neither a return to some former state of perfection nor the discovery or restoration of some mythic autonomous self. Healing, as we understand it, is precisely the opposite. It is change from a singular self, frozen in time by a moment of unspeakable experience, to a more fluid, more narratively able, more socially integrated self. (2000, 7)

In the following brief excerpt, David, who described himself as a “latchkey kid” after his parents’ divorce, illustrates this definition:

Alone in those hours, I created a world of my own self-expression. I sang loudly in operatic voices, my reedy swellings filling the great acoustic voids of the empty house. I talked to my dog, to our paintings, to myself. I read aloud, dramatically, and in monotone: I would say the same sentence one time for every word in the sentence, each time emphasizing a different word to see what difference it would make in meaning. I sat before the television, repeating dialogue of the talk show hosts, the newscasters, the PBS painting instructors—trying to say their own words before they said them, trying to predict what they might say, what they might think. I watched Mr. Rogers without the sound, supplying my own explanation soundtrack for tours of dairy farms and goldfish aquariums. (Course Document 1993)

As an adolescent, David fought his intense loneliness through exercising his voice, through engaging in language with television and painted imagery. He seemed to neuter his loneliness by hearing a real human voice, even if it was his own—in a sense, explaining his isolation to himself as he resisted it. Also, as an adult, David accomplished much the same thing by writing about these experiences. Then and later, he reduced or even avoided being “a singular self, frozen in time” by this negative situation. His breaking free of “time-binding” is an important victory when composing through trauma, as Anderson and MacCurdy (2000) clarify:

Traumatic events, because they do not occur within the parameters of “normal” reality, do not fit into the structure and flow of time. Instead, they are imprisoned within the psyche as discrete moments, frozen, isolated from normal memories. Because they are not connected to the normal, linear flow of time-bound memory, these moments emerge into consciousness at any point, bringing the force of the traumatic event with them. (6)

Voice and language and writing help David become more fluid and narratively able, which allows him to more precisely articulate the issue—and doing so usually indicates that one inhabits a more socially integrated self. Lucy, too, seems driven to narrate her “unspeakable experience,” to integrate it with her “previous” sense of self:

Not only did I privately recite narratives or storylines of hope, read narratives of hope and envision narratives of hope, I had to publically tell my own new narrative. I had to tell my story over and over, out loud, as a way to gain some control over it. Like wrangling a monster to the ground. My disease was so big and overwhelming, I had to find a way to incorporate this new narrative into the existing life I had been living—the 42 year old Lucy, mother of two, professor without terminal cancer. I had to hear my voice, the one I knew, the one that has been narrating my life all along tell this new part. Whether at a department meeting or in class, I told them. Whether it was relevant to the class or not, and as self-indulgent as it might have been, I needed to speak it. (Stanovick 2012)

Overall, though, most definitions remain limited unless they are grounded in specific experience, as David’s and Lucy’s are. Along with such unanchored definitions, writing-through-trauma research, since the early 1990’s, has focused on how writing affects specific and observable changes in our health, such as blood pressure or heart rate. This is a rich, extremely valuable body of work—summarized later—that’s been long over-due. Of course, the bulk of this research is quantitative in nature.

However, we know almost nothing about how, specifically, the written products and processes function in improving health. Researchers in writing, rhetoric, and pedagogy have not focused on how writing about trauma works, in terms of its specific language or its thinking and composing processes. What motivates them to write in the first place? How do they conceive of their audiences? How do they organize their pieces? What evidence appears in their writing—and in their reflections on this writing—that reveals specific critical thinking strategies? What language devices do they employ in their writing?

For these reasons and many more, I embarked on what became a ten-year study to describe, as closely as I could, how and why experienced, effective writers compose to “heal” themselves—the focus of the following chapters. Most of the people described in this book are language experts who have devoted their lives to the study and teaching of reading and writing. These professionals were tenured faculty members in university English and education departments, conducted research, published widely, presented frequently at professional meetings, and received awards for their work. Others were experienced teachers pursuing graduate degrees. A few are middle-school, junior high, and high school students.

In Chapter 1, “Composing through Trauma,” I describe the foundational principles or “pillars” of such composing. Only by immersion in “the thing itself” can we better understand such complex feelings, so I’ll try to anchor these principles in the experiences, products, and processes of all kinds of people, who, in many different ways, seek to compose their way through trauma.

Regardless of the age, background, or expertise level of these writers, trauma has a way of leveling the field on which they find themselves. While improvement in writing itself is not an explicit point or chapter in this book, I believe it reverberates in every line in the pages ahead. One argument behind this book is that writing not only wrestles with trauma, but in so doing, it develops many writing skills. Readers will find identification of numerous thinking strategies in nearly every discourse examined—especially those types of thinking that have long been heralded as necessary for academic prose and success in the workplace. In fact, I think that readers will find that improvement of discourse cannot help but occur when we write about trauma. After all, such writing occurs when we are literally driven to understand immediate issues weighting us down, when hesitancy, self-censorship, and cultural artifice have fallen away, when such “shackles” become, somehow, no longer very relevant. Writers, themselves, recognize when their words and voices ring true, when their knots of fear and confusion get laid out in clearer, straighter lines.

Chapter 2, “Beyond ‘Just Academic Stuff . . . ’” provides the main contexts for this work, describing the course, the teacher, and the resultant study. Writing, reading, visualizing, reflecting, revising, and talking about our trauma not only make us better writers, but they create an environment that leads to deeper, wider understanding of those unspeakable moments that too often lay frozen within us. However, this composing through trauma is by no means a magic bullet. Composing about trauma is not a cure-all or remotely similar to any kind of vague, mystical panacea. Instead, it’s hard work that demands commitment, time, extensive writing, thinking, and many other activities and processes.

Most of the people you’ll meet in the chapters ahead have experienced much worse traumas than I did when I couldn’t grasp the death of my grandfather. At that time, my only way to manage my grief was to bolt out of the dining room, run out to the yard, lay back in the grass, and watch the clouds drift above. Suddenly, brazenly, the world made no sense. When the people in this book turn to composing their way through trauma, they look face-up into that same sky that goes on forever, as they work toward understanding.

Traumas that we are compelled to write about are powerful human ones, which require a uniquely human response—writing to and for ourselves and trusted others—small, human voices that rail against the universe. Such writing is very much like prayer, whether or not we believe in a God. This, we have to believe, is the highest, holiest use of language imaginable.